Laura Merleau

In Different Parts of DNA Simultaneously


Ready to be joined with those
On the other side, with nobody
More than eight miles from the center

You left the largest
Part of yourself empty or sometimes
Produced by up to seven layers
Of slightly transparent color

Leaving room for eight tomorrows

But there were no planes
For Russia for three
Hours which the EPA was phasing out
In white retail space

Could such a strong detachment
Be overcome – now you
Wear only light, then you did
Not appear burrowed in mud

Drawing out the cancer the way
All 305 images of a cure
Yanked on the other
End of the polymerase chain reaction

Yet in the middle there is
Almost nothing
Happening except
The pilot transporting hearts

Because you’re leaving for Moscow
Tomorrow at temperatures mere
Billionths of a degree above absolute zero
Above existential shame, original
Sin, post-industrial sexuality
And extraterrestrial fashion

Making sure I’m the only
Channel for all your pleasure
No doubt soon going above
Or beyond the snowswept streets

All the way to the tippy tips of
Your fingers and toes and deities
Whose arms and legs froze
Simply because they knew

​Everything
​

Joy

                                          
I went looking for you
On a day so unlike today
Around a dome whose solid interior
Space has been eternally
Sealed off from play

My ignorance of time
Offset by my lust for flying

If the sun were shining with
Plenty of blame to go around like now
Maybe I’d have crash-landed
A couple of years and 500,000 feathers later
In a more remote or historically
Neutral part of town

Still I can’t shake the feeling that backward
Aerials could be repeated to infinity

Within lacework and zigzags
Radically relearning
How to withstand ocean deprivation
Deeper and deeper I fell
Through irregular tiers of even
Lighter veils

This is where your book always smiles
​
Certain scribes caught sight of us naked in the sky
But could not believe their eyes
And copied on

Bruised, bandaged, gauges missing
I would soon join their song

We had all the dreams
Like the one where nothing
Ever ends

While the geometric clarity
Of your whole design
Disappeared behind a honeycomb
Of ever-multiplying cells framed by tiny
Arches that hang like stalactites
From my ceiling
And the web
Of cracks covering nearly every bone
Record the shame and suffering
​My wings should outgrow

Great Gam-Equipped Perfume Bottles


From knotted graves uncovered
By a drenching rain

Without disturbing the delicate quantum
State of their atoms

Take a small handful
Of mallow and plantain leaves

And pain surrounded
By flapping doves

And pain so self-evident
It silences the dobermen

Ascribe the third
Angel to the laws
Of thermodynamics

Like someone coming
Out of image
Deprivation

It’s love that’s indifferent
To your brain

Consumed
To a thickness in a sufficient quantity
Of rose water until

It is consumed to a
Thickness

From one ounce and a half
Of oil of roses

Just-say-no sing-alongs
Are unlikely to make
A dent in this chain

Whitecapes driven
By relentless winds
From the north broke

At the foot of the volcano

Where three-fingered hands
Work the keys:

I will return, I will return

In a town where acacias bloom
Sit there computing for ten minutes

For over a hundred jeers
The islands out there in flames

A statue of the deposed plutocrat powdered
With ash on all eight wings

 



--
Laura Merleau lives in Waterloo, Illinois. Her novella Little Fugue was published by Woodley Memorial Press in 1993. Her poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in Ragazine, The Los Angeles Review, and Qarrtsiluni.